In conversation about privacy: Chelsea Manning and Carmela Troncoso

Chelsea Manning © Chelsea Manning - Former US army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning and EPFL Professor Carmela Troncoso, will be in conversation at EPFL's Rolex Learning Center next Monday for an exclusive, live discussion, open to the public and streamed, on privacy and data security for the public good. We live in a world of big tech and big data, a trend made ever more ubiquitous since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. As almost every aspect of our lives, in some way, now interacts with the digital world, discussions around the use and privacy of our personal data become ever more important. Chelsea Manning, an American activist known for disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750-thousand sensitive documents about the second Iraq war and Assistant Professor Carmela Troncoso, from EPFL's School of Computer and Communication Sciences , named in 2020 as a global top young tech leader by Fortune Magazine, are both passionate about data privacy. Manning now works for Nym Technologies , a Switzerland based startup, as a hardware optimization and security advisor. Nym protects data using what she describes as a 'cryptographic shroud', namely a mixnet, and Manning is investigating how to improve the speed and efficiency of the privacy system from a hardware perspective. "Privacy is violated by different actors and different approaches and methods of surveillance or monitoring all the time," she says.